The Merry, Merry, Month of May is here, the world still exists, and while idly scanning the screen, trying to sort fact from fiction, I became aware of something that might be of interest to you. It’s not such a terrifyingly life-threatening thing as the prospect of nuclear war, but it will, if it happens, be a big and costly event, and one which illustrates how far we have to go to achieve international co-operation. When Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to achieve orbit beeped its way around the planet Earth, it was so utterly alone, no-one imagined that one day, there would be so many satellites orbiting the sky above us as to be a hazard. They proved, however, to be ideal radio relay stations, so ideal as to be a threat to their own existence, here’s why:

For technical reasons, the ideal height above Earth for many radio relay applications is in the band between 400 and 600 kilometers, to the extent that the threat of collisions is so large that tracking stations are being built to try and forecast the likelihood of a collision and notify the operators so they can modify the orbits of the at-risk satellites to avoid a collision. A head-on collision at a closing speed of about 16 kM/ second would create thousands of pieces of space junk, travelling in random directions, each piece being a threat not only to other satellites in orbit, but to any spacecraft passing though this 400 to 600 kilometer band. Worst of all, it has been calculated that the density of this mixed swarm of functional satellites and wreckage from previous collisions could reach a point where there will be a kind of chain reaction, creating a cloud of space junk of all sizes, and presenting an unacceptable risk to any spacecraft passing through this band. A possible solution might have been having far fewer, much larger craft, each carrying a large number of communication modules. With enough tracking stations this might have reduced the risk of collisions to acceptable levels. It might yet be possible, but it would be much harder to achieve now than if it had been done earlier. But that would have required international co-operation, wouldn’t it?
The amazing thing about this is, we knew it was coming, and efforts have been made to control the numbers, but every country and large corporation has managed to find ways to launch these in significant numbers without restriction despite the introduction of many regulations and laws to keep the region of space around planet Earth an uncluttered and orderly place – so what happened? Could it be that the huge advantage of moving so much of our commercial and military communication into this relatively small band of space, despite knowing that there is a limit which we are fast approaching, won the day?- you bet it could.

So the day might be far off when the huge number of these high speed projectiles will overcome the capacity of the tracking systems and the ability to change the orbits of these missiles to prevent collisions, leading to a runaway increase until the Earth is surrounded by a shell of high speed bits space junk maybe smashed to the size of pebbles, heralding the end of our dreams of space travel and also a dramatic decrease in cellphone and television traffic, also military communications, until we find a way to clean up the mess. Sorry about your cellphones, kiddies.

Silly old blogger, imagine not foreseeing that!